Why Do African Americans Trust Doctors?

When you think of a doctor you think of a remarkable, intelligent human being who works tirelessly every single day to save people’s lives. Doctors are the people who heal others, who cure others, who take care of others. Doctors are a vital part of our society. When people go to the doctor they put their lives in their doctors hands, typically people trust doctors. Unfortunately that is not the case for everyone, some people do not trust doctors because maybe they’ve had a few bad experiences with doctors or in some African American’s case they don’t trust doctors because of what has happened in the past in American history where African Americans are abused and taken advantage of by doctors solely because the color of their skin. Because of cases like the Henrietta Lacks case, the Tuskegee experiment, the Negro Project etc. these cases have created a distrust between African Americans and doctors.
In an article called ‘White Torture of Black Bodies’ on breakingbrown.com it states “In his memoir former slave John Brown described how his master, Dr. Thomas Hamilton of Georgia, tortured him with homemade medical experiments…” Back when slavery was around experiments on slaves by their slave owners was very common. It is even talked about in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks book it says “To discourage slaves from meeting or escaping, slave owners told tales of gruesome research done on black bodies…” The abuse and torture on black bodies for ‘experimentation’ did not stop there, it in fact continued on for years and years to